This week we have finished compiling documents and a selection of photos related to the Chixoy Dam Reparations Campaign and are pleased to present them to you here!
From 1995 to mid-2000s, Rights Action supported this courageous effort by impoverished Mayan Achi people to tell the truth about and seek justice for massacres, killings and rapes, and illegal forced evictions suffered at the hands of the U.S.-backed regimes of generals Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, violence that was carried out to help advance the Chixoy hydro-electric dam project of the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
The two “development” banks invested 100s of millions of dollars in partnership with the Guatemalan military regime, to build the Chixoy dam. Over 440 Rio Negro villagers were killed and their ancestral home village destroyed, as part of the forced relocation of close to 30 villages, to make way for the filling of the dam’s flood basin.
After years of courageous struggle, a small measure of reparations was paid to survivor families by the Guatemala government, starting in 2014. Not a penny was paid by the World Bank or Inter-American Development Bank, that both profitted from their investments in this project.
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